Term Paper on Greek Mythology on Modern Life
From time to time a myth returns symbolically carrying an eternal moral message. If in Greek mythology we witness a struggle between gods of goodness and gods of evil, in Shakespeare's drama Hamlet we see a fight of forces that ends tragically with the death of the main figures. On the stage of real life we also see a struggle between good and evil, justice versus digression that continues until the end of life.
People watch familiar characters on stage, probably because they are even
more familiar in real life:
• The successful man, thoughtful, considerate, yet in the end as likely to
make a smart decision as a loving one.
• The self-sacrificing daughter who puts the welfare of her family ahead of
her own
• The domineering matron who, armed with nothing but brains and nerve,
strives to sustain her disintegrating family and its business.
• The hot-tempered youth, drinking and fighting too much, easily offended,
too passionate. One day, when maturity tempers his strength and ardor, he
could amount to a great deal -- if he doesn't get himself killed first.
Countless plays -- and soap operas -- have featured characters like these.
(Countless family dinners have, too.) So does "Tantalus, " the epic drama
that opened last weekend at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. But
even though it's a new work, we already know these characters' names:
Agamemnon. Iphigenia. Hecuba. Achilles. Olympian in every respect,
"Tantalus" aims at nothing less than the restoration of Greek mythology to
its central place in Western consciousness.
"Tantalus" is about a war; from the standpoint of Western cultural history,
it is about the first war that matters. "Agon," the Greek term for the
conflict of characters in a drama, also means "contest, " so here it carries
a double suggestion: the conflict of the characters and the conflict in
which they fight. The war begins when the Trojan prince Paris, son of Hecuba
and Priam, runs off with the beautiful Helen, taking her from her home and
husband, Menelaus, in Sparta. Menelaus' brother, Agamemnon, leads the
Western (Greek) kings as they try to bring Helen home. But by the time they
succeed, 10 years have passed. Great Troy lies in ruins, its men dead and
its women enslaved. Agamemnon has sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to the
angry gods, his wife has killed him, their son Orestes has killed her and
Agamemnon's ally, Odysseus, is the only leader of the victorious army in any
shape to go on with his life. By that point, people can barely remember how
the whole thing started. Sound familiar? Sure it does. Troy is in modern
Turkey; the Balkans are right around the corner. Both sides are proud both
make big mistakes, both enjoy grandeur both suffer. It wouldn't take much to
see them as allies, but they aren't. Their s truggle -- the "agon" --
defines them for themselves and for each other. That notion of identity
through enmity -- Mets and Yankees, Democrats and Republicans, North and
South, black hats and white hats -- shapes Western culture to this day. And
we got it from the Greeks.
“We live according to deep narratives or myths that are usually beneath the
surface of awareness. Greek mythology offers an effective way to perceive
those narratives and images. The special advantage of Greek myth as opposed
to other mythologies is that it has been elaborated in our art and
literature and is present in our very language, in the Greek roots of many
of our words” (Allen, 2000)
Starting from a tragedy, both in mythology and in the real world full of
social and political conflicts, the Midasism mentality that has penetrated
into nearly all aspects of our community is caused by an erosion of our
religiousness and understanding of religion. Religion with sacred values is
rather misunderstood and rarely made into a legitimating to attain certain
objectives. Or even religion is only made into a place of escape from
disappointment and sad feelings so that religion loses its role to increase
the quality of life of its believers. Thus, the religious institution
changes its function into a kind of instant repair shop containing a lot of
worn-out articles.
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